Archive for the 'Sybase IQ' Category

I plan to evaluate a DBMS based on columns (not rows like Oracle, SQL Server…), called Sybase IQ these days, in order to see if we can avoid some aggregation in DSS environments. It’s a nice little niche product, quite handy, but due to its niche status, you don’t find a lot about it in the www. I want to try to change this a little, little bit today.

Installing Sybase IQ 15.1 is not that complicated. By following the installation guide from sybase.com, it took me about an hour to figure out what’s to do, and another to get the box up and running. Creating and starting a demo database is described in the same paper, and worked flawlessly.

But now my problem did rise: My target is to do mass data tests within the DB, so I need mass data storage access, preferably on a raw device, bypassing the file system caches of my Linux/ext3 system. Since using persistent device names and directly accessed (“raw”) devices from /dev/disk/by-id works greatly with my Oracle systems, I headed for this. My final attempt, after looking up some SQL syntax, was: